For 10 years, Galerie Binome has been exploring new forms and the limits of photography. For its first participation at Art Rotterdam, it proposes DOMINANT SUNS, a duo show Laurence Aëgerter / Mustapha Azeroual, whose intriguing, sometimes protean works revisit traditional creative processes in a very contemporary approach. The theme of the stand is built around the relationship to light and more particularly to the fascination exerted by the setting sun.
Designed for Laurence Aëgerter’s solo exhibition at the Musée du Petit Palais in Paris, in dialogue with the work of Jean Monet, Soleils couchants sur la Seine à Lavancourt (2020) is a large Jacquard tapestry, sumptuous in its play of light and matter. The French artist, who has been living and working in Amsterdam for 25 years, created it with the Textile Lab of the Tilburg Museum. Since the opening of the exhibition in October, with the sponsorship of the Mondriaan Fund, this work is praised by the public and the press.
Mustapha Azeroual’s work was much noticed last year at Unseen and Paris Photo with the works Radiance, which are now part of the JP Morgan (US), MACAAL (Morocco) and AMart (Fr) collections. Radiance #7 (2020), a new lenticular work in the series, is an inventory of the colours of light in the setting sun. The spectator is fascinated by the luminous variations that are activated as he moves, as if it were up to him to trigger the Sun’s race.
This movement within a photographic work can also be found in Laurence Aëgerter’s series Cathédrales hermétiques. Totally black on the exhibition wall, the photographs of the nave of the churches hidden under the layer of heat-sensitive screen printing reveal themselves before our eyes under the effect of a ray of Sunlight placed on the works. This series was exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles (2019) and at the Nederlands Fotomuseum.
Opposite, like burning Suns, Mustapha Azeroual’s Monade series is emblematic of his research on light, the raw material of photography. It is also part of his recurrent practice of bichromate gum, which he shakes up in more than one way by working without a camera and using fluorescent pigments, capable of revealing a latent image under different lighting conditions. Works in this series have already joined the collections of Marieke and Pieter Sanders (NL) and AMart (Fr). It is also presented
this autumn in a double exhibition «La photographie à l’épreuve de l’abstraction» at the Centre Photographique d’Ile de France and at the FRAC Normandie Rouen. New and old pieces of the Monade serie has been showned at the Ferragamo flagship, italian luxury house.